Biography

Wallace A. Carlson (March 28, 1894 – May 9, 1967) was a pioneering American animator and comic strip artist based in Chicago. Known to his friends as Wally Carlson, he usually signed his work as Wallace Carlson. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Carlson moved with his family in 1905 to Chicago, where he took a job at the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper as a copy boy. Soon he was contributing cartoons to the paper. Some time after the newspaper folded, Carlson created his first animated cartoon, Joe Boko Breaking Into the Big League (1914) completely on his own, the same year as Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. The success of this short gained the attention of the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, who engaged Carlson to create a series, Canimated Nooz Pictorials, that was combined into their newsreels. At first the character Joe Boko continued from the older subject, but shortly Carlson introduced Dreamy Dud, a winsome lad whose daydreams gets him into various troublesome situations. Carlson's Dreamy Dud pictures remain his best known work in posterity.

In 1917, Carlson began to work for John Randolph Bray and developed other characters, including Otto Luck and Goodrich Dirt, the latter being a short, squat bearded hobo in ragged clothes who seemed to have perpetual bad luck. When Carlson introduced the Us Fellers series at Bray in 1919, it provided him the opportunity to bring back Dreamy Dud, who was the main focus of these subjects.